Hellen Oti
Once upon a time, I had a very scary adventure on Google. Yes, I did the ultimate Google blunder—I started searching for a diagnosis to a small rash that I saw on my arm.
Turns out it was nothing really more than a mere allergic reaction, but before I got to this conclusion, I had gone through hundreds of forums, blogs, medical researches and articles that said it could be an early sign of a cancerous disease.
Trust me, I had a few terrifying days in front of my computer.
Hopefully you don’t take your medical advise from the web, but it can still be frustrating if you can’t find exactly what you are looking for when you do a search on Google. In some cases you might be looking for something that is not readily available on the Internet (in my case a real examination from a doctor in person).
While in some instances, you could be trying to figuratively find the needle in the haystack of search results. Knowing these quick Google search tips can help save you time and perhaps even some frustration.
Hack #1. Shortcut to finding all webpages from a Particular Website:
There are times when you might do a Google search to find something from a website that you know or think might have the information that you are looking for. When you don’t know the right keywords to put into Google to find the page on the website that you are looking for, searching through a list of indexed pages on Google can sometimes do the trick. To find all indexed pages for any website simple type in site: (website url) eg. To find all indexed pages for the MarketingWorld you would type: site:http://marketing-world.net
Hack #2: Refine Your search for better results
This second hack is a Google Adwords keyword match trick that can be applied to your search results. Most users usually type in the search phrase or keywords into Google in a way that gives them a broad match or search results that include a broader variety of items that are related to what they are looking for. For instance entering the phrase women’s shoes in Google is broad search.
If I want to refine the search results so only search results that have the phrase women’s shoes will show in the results I could easily put the phrase women’s shoes in quotations. So in my example, my new search would look like this: “women’s shoes”. This type of search is a phrase match. Depending on what you are looking for, sometimes refining your search results with these parameters can go a long way in helping you improve your results.
Hack # 3: Use related search list to find new phrase ideas
There are times when you have trouble finding something on Google only because you are not typing in the right keywords. Most search users go back to refine their search phrases or keywords when they are unable to find the search results that they are looking for. When thinking of what you should be searching for, use the related search results at the bottom of every Google search to help you come with ideas. In some cases you may find keyword phrases that you may not have thought about but could be the key to finding what you are looking for.
Featured Image source: Denys Prykhodov / Shutterstock.com
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